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For Christmas I got a fascinating present from a buddy - my very own "very popular" book.

"Tech-Splaining for Dummies" (terrific title) bears my name and my image on its cover, and it has glowing reviews.

Yet it was completely written by AI, with a few easy triggers about me provided by my good friend Janet.

It's an intriguing read, and very funny in parts. But it also meanders rather a lot, and is someplace in between a self-help book and a stream of anecdotes.

It imitates my chatty style of writing, but it's also a bit repetitive, and very verbose. It may have surpassed Janet's prompts in collating data about me.

Several sentences start "as a leading innovation journalist ..." - cringe - which could have been scraped from an .

There's also a mysterious, repetitive hallucination in the kind of my feline (I have no pets). And there's a metaphor on nearly every page - some more random than others.

There are dozens of business online offering AI-book composing services. My book was from BookByAnyone.

When I called the president Adir Mashiach, based in Israel, forum.altaycoins.com he told me he had actually offered around 150,000 customised books, mainly in the US, since rotating from putting together AI-generated travel guides in June 2024.

A paperback copy of your own 240-page long best-seller costs ₤ 26. The company uses its own AI tools to produce them, based on an open source large language model.

I'm not asking you to purchase my book. Actually you can't - only Janet, who created it, can buy any more copies.

There is currently no barrier to anyone producing one in anybody's name, including celebs - although Mr Mashiach says there are guardrails around violent content. Each book contains a printed disclaimer stating that it is imaginary, produced by AI, and designed "solely to bring humour and joy".

Legally, the copyright comes from the company, but Mr Mashiach worries that the item is intended as a "personalised gag gift", and the books do not get sold further.

He wishes to expand his variety, producing various categories such as sci-fi, and maybe offering an autobiography service. It's designed to be a light-hearted type of consumer AI - offering AI-generated items to human clients.

It's likewise a bit frightening if, like me, you write for a living. Not least since it most likely took less than a minute to produce, and it does, certainly in some parts, sound just like me.

Musicians, authors, artists and stars worldwide have actually expressed alarm about their work being utilized to train generative AI tools that then churn out comparable material based upon it.

"We ought to be clear, when we are discussing data here, we really indicate human creators' life works," says Ed Newton Rex, founder of Fairly Trained, which campaigns for AI firms to respect creators' rights.

"This is books, this is short articles, this is images. It's masterpieces. It's records ... The entire point of AI training is to find out how to do something and after that do more like that."

In 2023 a song featuring AI-generated voices of Canadian vocalists Drake and The Weeknd went viral on social media before being pulled from streaming platforms because it was not their work and they had not granted it. It didn't stop the track's developer trying to choose it for forum.batman.gainedge.org a Grammy award. And although the artists were phony, it was still wildly popular.

"I do not believe using generative AI for creative purposes need to be prohibited, but I do think that generative AI for these purposes that is trained on people's work without consent need to be banned," Mr Newton Rex adds. "AI can be very powerful however let's develop it morally and fairly."

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China's DeepSeek AI shakes market and damages America's swagger

In the UK some organisations - consisting of the BBC - have actually selected to obstruct AI designers from trawling their online content for training purposes. Others have chosen to collaborate - the Financial Times has actually partnered with ChatGPT creator OpenAI for example.

The UK government is considering an overhaul of the law that would permit AI designers to utilize creators' content on the internet to assist establish their designs, unless the rights holders decide out.

Ed Newton Rex explains this as "insanity".

He explains that AI can make advances in locations like defence, healthcare and logistics without trawling the work of authors, reporters and artists.

"All of these things work without going and altering copyright law and ruining the livelihoods of the nation's creatives," he argues.

Baroness Kidron, a crossbench peer in the House of Lords, is likewise highly against removing copyright law for AI.

"Creative industries are wealth creators, 2.4 million tasks and a great deal of joy," states the Baroness, who is likewise a consultant to the Institute for Ethics in AI at Oxford University.

"The government is weakening among its finest performing markets on the unclear guarantee of growth."

A government spokesperson said: "No move will be made until we are absolutely confident we have a useful plan that provides each of our objectives: increased control for ideal holders to assist them accredit their content, access to premium material to train leading AI designs in the UK, and more openness for right holders from AI designers."

Under the UK government's brand-new AI plan, a nationwide data library including public data from a large range of sources will likewise be provided to AI researchers.

In the US the future of federal rules to control AI is now up in the air following President Trump's return to the presidency.

In 2023 Biden signed an executive order that intended to improve the security of AI with, to name a few things, companies in the sector needed to share details of the functions of their systems with the US federal government before they are released.

But this has now been reversed by Trump. It remains to be seen what Trump will do instead, however he is said to desire the AI sector to deal with less regulation.

This comes as a variety of suits against AI companies, and especially versus OpenAI, continue in the US. They have been gotten by everyone from the New York Times to authors, music labels, and even a comic.

They claim that the AI companies broke the law when they took their content from the internet without their permission, and oke.zone used it to train their systems.

The AI companies argue that their actions fall under "reasonable usage" and are therefore exempt. There are a number of factors which can make up reasonable use - it's not a straight-forward meaning. But the AI sector is under increasing analysis over how it gathers training data and whether it should be spending for it.

If this wasn't all adequate to ponder, Chinese AI company DeepSeek has shaken the sector over the previous week. It ended up being one of the most downloaded complimentary app on Apple's US App Store.

DeepSeek claims that it established its innovation for a fraction of the cost of the likes of OpenAI. Its success has raised security issues in the US, and threatens American's present dominance of the sector.

When it comes to me and a profession as an author, I think that at the minute, if I truly want a "bestseller" I'll still have to compose it myself. If anything, Tech-Splaining for Dummies highlights the current weak point in generative AI tools for bigger jobs. It has lots of inaccuracies and hallucinations, and it can be quite hard to check out in parts due to the fact that it's so long-winded.

But given how rapidly the tech is developing, parentingliteracy.com I'm uncertain how long I can stay positive that my considerably slower human writing and modifying abilities, are better.

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